Peter von Tiesenhausen walks through corridors of hanging paper into a series of scavenger’s sculptures and monumental objects of impermanence. Then he says it himself: “Death is in the air.”

Ah, but there’s so much more here than just death. Unprodded, the Peace Country artist describes Songs for Pythagoras, his exhibition of dozens of proofs of concept taking up the gallery’s entire third floor in multiple chambers. It opens to the public Saturday. “The show is all about everything, really. The universe, climate change — all the things we care about. Time scale, space scale.

“Life and death, all that s–t,” he says cheerfully.

But let’s back up to the idea of scale for a second. When you first enter, there’s a dark hallway. Atop a thin pyramid at waist height, a tiny peppercorn painted as our planet is illuminated weakly. The artist explains, “If that’s the Earth, at the other end of the gallery there’s the sun — 150 feet away — 16 inches in diameter.

“Alpha Centauri, the next solar system, to scale, is in China. That’s how f—ing alone we are in the universe.”

The sound of singing, you might say angelic, fills the whole space. From the next chamber, it scores a video piece for which he hired a cinematographer and two sound artists. “One of them happened to be my son, Magnus Tiesenhausen,” he says with pride.

In a 41-minute loop, Magnus Tiesenhausen and Jen Reamer’s improvised voices echo through a 14-minute film shot in an empty underground reservoir in northeast Calgary, where pillars in rows look like a scraped-lifeless La Mezquita mosque in Cordoba.

“It’d been full of water for 40 years, emptied to do maintenance,” the artist said. “The resonance in this chamber, you’d make a sound and it would reverberate for 25 seconds.”

Outside the door as we move through — the echoes still audible, keep in mind — a beautifully damning portrait in tar. Opposite, more echoes, sits a cube made of stacked, 21-inch steel leftovers, salvaged from and representing 400 or so fracking tanks. You can pick one of the 800 strips up, no problem. But arranged together, von Tiesenhausen notes, the area had to be roped off because the extra weight of visitors could potentially collapse the floor. Seriously.

“The engineer of the gallery said you can’t have people in there. It’s two tonnes. So all of a sudden it becomes this toxic thing. Two of them lying there, it looks like no mass at all. But when you pile them up like that … which is kind of what we’re doing with the province, digging all these holes.”

In the reservoir video, dust particles float slowly onscreen in the void, moved by breath. This too is echoed in the paper-walled corridor, which follows with your movement, “like a pulse in a vein,” says von Tiensenhausen.

The shifting hallway is called The Waters of Lethe — taken from Greek mythology, water you drink after death to forget your previous life. “They say that when you go from one room to another, you’re more liable to forget. So there’s this idea of forgetting, too.”

By now you should be feeling the tone of the whole show.

“Then it’s a bunch of s–t on a shelf,” he laughs.

Along the wall, dozens of objects sit — an axe, boat shapes, a toolbox, numerous sculptures. But like everything in this landmark exhibit, each has a fable, a rumination with a purpose.

Von Tiesenhausen runs his fingers along a polished rock. “This is like Jupiter, it’s just a rock from my field.” But he brings up an ancient sculpture of St. Peter in Rome, his toes eroded to a formless shape after being kissed, what, billions of times in 800 years?

A sculpture the artist’s other son once made of his irregular heart sits on another shelf near a keyholder made by von Tiesenhausen’s brother, who died last year. So is a cast of words this brother once carved into a tree in 1967, now crumbling, the tree long gone.

One of von Tiesenhausen’s sculptures is a tangle of cast bronze around wood. He notes the inside will also crumble with time. And yet, “If you find this in 5,000 years in the dirt, it’s still going to be an interesting thing, even though you don’t know who I am or what the context was.”

More of this artistic insignificance comes talking about plywood he’s hanging in the show, rescued from a mill. “The boards, when they came flying out of the end of the sawmill, they would hit this thing. This is better than any painting that I’ve made in my life.”

OK, before we write off von Tiesenhausen, let’s remember he’s world famous for copyrighting his land as an artwork near Demmit, Alta. — to deter pipeline intrusion. Anyone who wants to even talk to him about developing it has to pay $500 an hour to hear the same answer: No.

Last fall, von Tiesenhausen’s shimmering humanoid sculpture Drawn By Desire debuted as permanent art in Londonderry Mall’s Simons store, and his work has long been found at Peter Robertson Gallery on 124 Street.

A satellite dish Peter von Tiesenhausen used to boil water with the sun’s reflection is at AGA.Fish Griwkowsky /
Postmedia

As we saw at Simons, the artist is also known for a number of career-long ideas to which he circles back, including his timeless human figures, sometimes painted small on driftwood, or carved in silhouette into ice. Castoffs from the Simons piece were used in a satellite dish in this show.

Some of his older work is redeployed at the new AGA show — including his five charred wooden figures, which circumnavigated Canada by truck on land and, over sea, by icebreaker. But this show is clearly not a retrospective — it’s full of new work like yet another video piece, which looks like glaciers collapsing. Almost comically, it’s actually plaster powder rolling slowly in a barbecue rotisserie — but the effect is haunting.

He looks into a long beam of wood into the darkness near the tiny Earth, complaining with a laugh, “I can’t see a thing.

“It’s about trying to see infinity, which is obviously impossible.”

Taken as metaphor, brown and cracked and burned, almost all of von Tiesenhausen’s clever-as-hell art is both environmental and political. Yet he always avoids yelling from some pulpit.

“We despair about our own stupidity as a society. I don’t have a belief system — I don’t know what’s true. But I do know you can’t sterilize this planet very easily. But we’re probably going to get rid of ourselves.”

This leads us over to a brick on a shelf, covered in moss, which he pets with a smile: “There’s that old saying, over these cities this grass will grow.”

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